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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

The Pearl: Sample Answer 3

Choose an incident in the novel “The Pearl” which teaches you a valuable moral lesson by providing evidence from the text.

An incident which teaches a valuable lesson is when Kino goes to La Paz town to sell his pearl. A valuable moral lesson that one can learn from the incident is not to believe people easily. The pearl buyers are very selfish and self-centred with ulterior motives. They want to get the pearl by paying very low prices for it. The moral lesson reminds us not to trust people easily even though they use all their skills and ‘sweet talk’ you to part with something valuable.

In the incident, one of the pearl dealers tells Kino that his pearl is large and clumsy, thus it would only interest museums to get it as a collection of seashells. Another dealer tells Kino that his pearl is large and it is similar to ‘fool’s gold’ and does not have any value. In short, the pearl buyers try to convince Kino that his pearl is worthless. The three dealers offer Kino prices ranging from 500 pesos to 1500 only, which shows that they are taking advantage of Kino’s innocence and lack of knowledge in pearl trading. A lesson can be drawn from this incident; do not accept anything at face value.

Kino does not accept the pearl traders offer and defies them. He knows that the pearl is worth about 50,000 pesos. Thus, he decides to take his pearl the capital where the pearl would definitely fetch a high price.

It is morally wrong to cheat an innocent person, who is illiterate and lacks knowledge. The pearl buyers are mean, they are only interested in the pearl and do not bother that Kino works hard diving into the sea to look for the pearl to get money to treat his son Coyotito. In the end, Kino senses that the pearl buyers are evil-minded people who are conspiring to cheat him of his pearl as he feels he is being trapped into departing with his pearl.